


meant it sincere back then

by saphro



Category: The Get Down (TV)
Genre: -Ish, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-22
Updated: 2017-04-22
Packaged: 2018-10-22 13:59:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10698474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saphro/pseuds/saphro
Summary: It doesn’t hurt as much as you thought it might have.You hear “Shaolin was my heart”.It hurts more.





	meant it sincere back then

**Author's Note:**

> a 3am character study, inspired by the fact that the entirety of older zeke's rhymes are a fucking love letter to shao

It’s been years and it ain’t like you’re okay now, but you’re better. You ain’t never gonna be okay maybe but you’re working on swallowing that.

It’s been years when it happens, is the thing.

It’s been years, but then you hear your name on the radio.

You hear it on the radio and when you pass by record shops that are fewer now and in cabs and coming tiny from the earphones of people in the bus.

And people listening to it always got a look to them. With their eyes closing or their fists clenchin’ and their feet tapping, like the music hits them in their bones and it ain't a surprise, not really, Books always had some way with words, time and distance don’t change that.

You buy the fucking album.

And then you hear your name, his mouth wrapping around the words in a way you haven’t heard anyone besides him doing. Same tone, same voice but harder and rougher around the edges and with something coloring it that wasn’t there all those years ago.

It doesn’t hurt as much as you thought it might have.

You hear “Shaolin was my heart”.

It hurts more.

It burns your throat and it makes your heart swell against your ribs, and your pulse press against your mouth and you don’t know what to do with yourself.

You listen to it on repeat while sitting on the roofs that are both cleaner and dirtier that they used to be and when you’re leaning against the pole on the train and when you run.

These days music can come with you anywhere, outside your head, for cheap and you’ve never been more grateful.

You listen to the voice huffing out your name, yelling it and mumbling it and it’s always rough and it takes you back, even though it’s much too deep now for the fantasy to be true.

For a month you let the sound of it wash over you first thing in the morning and in the laundromat and while walking back to your apartment but then you realise it probably ain’t healthy to feel so much, so you stop

You stop, but sometimes at night when you’re too weak, maybe, or too tired to bear it, you sit with your forearms resting on the rails on the fire escape looking down at the colors reflected on the wet ground and you breathe in the air of your city and let the words fill you up. And you sit still like that until morning sometimes, with the cars and horns and people talking as a backdrop, pressing your weight over your arms on the metal until it digs in and hurts and the chipping paint and rust comes off in flakes and sits on your sweaty skin.

And you spend hours feeling too much and not enough. You hear the story – your story – the one that scratched you up and spat you out the way you are today.

But then –

Then, months after that, you hear something else on the radio.

You get tickets somehow. You don’t know why really. You know it ain’t the right or good thing to do. For him and for you too. And there’s a voice in your head saying he don’t want you there, but you buy them anyway.

You get in and blend in easy with the crowd because that’s a thing you know how to do now.

You hear that voice loud, with the beat pounding down on your heart like a hand hitting your chest and you hear your name sung by five or ten or a hundred people around you like a word practised, everyone slipping over it like it ain’t nothing.

But you’re not really hearing any other voice other than the one on the damn stage, practised and confident and full. Full of everything you left behind you years and years ago and it makes you feel some type of way, like it always does.

You hear “Shaolin was my heart” and he’s twenty feet in front of you and you’ve never felt him farther away, even when his voice was only coming out of a tiny speaker and shitty headphones that chew sound.

But still it’s not until the end that you really decide.

It’s the last show of the tour, you heard. His first show back where he started, this you know, like some poetic shit that he used to like. And after he’s gone over the last verse, and the echoes of the mics and the shouts are dying down he stands still for a moment looking at the crowd like he ain’t really seeing them at all, for a moment, and then another.

He’s said his thanks and goodnights but he just stands there for some time.

And then he turns his back and walks off the stage, almost dragging his steps. Slowly the place gets emptier and quieter.

You don’t rush your way backstage and you don’t push anyone in your way because it don’t feel like reality anyway.

It feels like maybe you’re a ghost and touching anyone will shatter you, or them.

It’s quiet or maybe it’s just your head, messed up from the people shouting and hollering around your ears for hours or the absence of the base heavy in your bones

“Hey” you say and it’s not any good way to start this, but it’s not like you ever had a way with words like he has so it doesn’t really matter anyway. “Hey Books” you say and the sound of it’s rough and scrapped out of your throat like you’ve been yelling.

Maybe you have.

Your lungs feel like you have been maybe yelling for years

His head shoots up when he realises, and for a second you can read his eyes but it don’t last long.

He ain’t the same person; your brain logically knows this. It’s been years, you’re not expecting to see the kid he was last time you talked. In fact you know he’s different.

You can tell in his rhymes and in the way he speaks and carries himself, in the set of his shoulders and the tension on the cords of his neck.

But damn if he ain’t looking at you the same way he always did back then.

And fucking damn it, if it doesn’t make your heart try to push out of your ribs, slip out and reach for him like something fucked up.

He’s just looking at you and his eyes are wide, like maybe he’s surprised but there’s ache there too and when you open up your mouth to speak your spit tastes like metal, like maybe there’s blood in it, so you have to stop and swallow hard.

“’S a good show you put out there man,” you say, like there aren’t miles between you and like it doesn’t break you a little inside to be here in this way, “you got a good thing going”.

“I missed you”

There’s more you’d wanted to say, meaningless things and roughness and ramblings that don’t matter but he interrupts you and it’s–

Somehow it’s still the same because he doesn’t try to bullshit his way though it like you’ve been doing, and it’s the first time you’ve heard him speak this close to you in lifetimes and–

“Yeah,” you say once you’ve tried to calm your pulse down and failed, “yeah, me too” you say a beat too late, and there is too much feeling inside it but neither of you say anything about it. Situation normal.

There’s a noise he makes in his throat and suddenly he’s closer and there are arms around your neck and back and it ain’t a bullshit hug, it’s long and your face is on his neck because even after a lifetime he’s still got half an inch on you and he smells like sweat and people and like something you forgot and you squeeze harder when you hear his breath hitch.


End file.
